Best If Kept Frozen
by SheHatesWriting
Summary: Peggy impulsively decided, on that frozen February day in 1945, that she wasn't going to lose Steve. Instead, she decided, if he was going to sacrifice himself for the 'greater good,' then so would she. But in an interesting turn of events, she and Steve wake up 70 years later, with a mischievous god on the loose, with mad plans for world domination. STEGGY. FULL SUMMARY INSIDE.
1. it ended with prologue

**SUMMARY:** Peggy impulsively decided, on that frozen February day in 1945, that she wasn't going to lose Steve. Instead, she decided to come with him onto the Valkyrie. And while she had accepted that death was always the assumed endgame in that scenario, she hadn't planned on waking up in a modern-day hospital-70 years later. And as it turns out, it's a good thing she did because Thor's adopted older brother, has just turned up, and apparently, he has some mad plans for world domination. STEGGY. Takes place before/during/after _The Avengers_ (2012). T because I love sexual themes, swearing, semi-graphic descriptions, and other slightly explicit content that kids 13 and younger should be aware of. :) :) :)

* * *

 **A/N: Hello everyone, :)**

 **This story will be slow-going and probably, unfortunately, remain in un-updated stasis for long periods of time. But it is a story I've wanted to write for some time so I'm going to write it when life gives me a moment (even if that means for months/years, at a time :/). But, for now, enjoy this little prologue of boring nonsense.**

 **LOTS OF LOVE,**

 **Fel :)**

* * *

Engineer Tim "Timey" Astron had been ready to call the mission a dud. They had been digging for thirteen hours, chasing after a ghost signal of some kind of rare, alkaline metal, and yet, there was no sign of anything. He glanced up from his work into the freezing, barren landscape around them, as he was greeted by an icy blast in the face. This was summer, apparently, in the North Pole. Global warming his ass—nothing was warm up here. He sighed and adjusted the strap on the back of his goggles. If something even slipped out of place, frostbite could set in, in a matter less than five minutes.

He hated these 'exploratory digs,' as they were called. He wasn't an anthropologist, archeologist, paleontologist, or any 'ologist,' for that matter, he had just been asked to build this intensely, supercharged drill. No one asked him to actually go one the dig. Until SHIELD showed up. And then he didn't have the option.

Fuck. He just wanted to go home to his wife. Too bad she was 30,000 miles away in a much warmer place, probably watching a rerun of Dr. Phil.

He slapped his transmitter against his leg to stop it from beeping. It had been beeping furiously like that for the past _thirteen hours—_ did he already say that? Good. It needed to be said again. They were literally digging a hole that was thirteen hours deep. The real kicker was, that if they had been hand-digging this hole, which they had for part of the day while the drill was refueling, it would take them 20 years to cover as much ground as they had. _Twenty years._ All in the pursuit of some "rare" metal that could be used to probably fix 1950s-era _toilet handles._

He was tired. He wanted to go home. Timey had been tired before he even came to the dig site three weeks ago, because the thirteen-hour (and counting) hole, could only be dug by a massive, industrial drill that he had hand-designed, built, and arranged to be lugged out here to fucking 'freeze your ass off' Antarctica. But when SHIELD shows up on your front door and demands that you build a giant drill, you build a giant drill. Especially, for the amount they were offering him. But he'd go back on that, now. This fucking sucked.

"I'll be back in a minute." He told the SHIELD agent observing the dig. He'd try and send a message to Kiara, his wife, while there was still some signal to use in the fading light of the day.

He handed off the drill's controls to Washington, his firm partner and longtime friend, before pulling himself out of the hole's bordering circumference and stalked to the makeshift base camp they had set up for the night. Overhead, even with the screaming winds and bitterly frigid night air, there were large, puffy clouds overhead, packed with shimmering lights of color. Fluctuations of gas, dust, and light. People traveled all over the world, freezing their asses off to see sights like these—greasy rainbows bursting through the night sky of the artic—when, really, they were all just a bunch of gaseous clouds, clogging up the ozone. Figures that would be the thing humans care about, not the actual content of the colorful, technicolored patterns of the sky, just how they looked on your desktop screensaver.

His transmitter, despite being a good 100 feet away from the dig site, was still vibrating and rattling against his leg with some kind of vehement energy. "Christ." He hissed as he stepped outside the tent in nothing but his under-armor, feeling the instant chill sink into his skin. He pulled out his transmitter and switched it from the iron tracing mode to the infrared mechanism. "What the hell are you pickin' up on?" And that's when he saw it. He probably would have missed it, had it not been for the _microscopic_ reading located nearly _half_ a mile beneath his feet. Holy shit. Something was _alive._

Suddenly, Timey didn't care about the arctic air slapping him across the face or the frostbite scare he would have to deal with later, because as far as he knew, something was breathing, something was _real_ beneath all that ice. He was sprinting madly back to the dig site, shouting commands to Washington—"PULL UP TO THE LEFT, WASH, TO THE LEFT." The five other heads of his team (a group of scientists and engineers) looked up to see him madly running towards them, practically naked in the freezing air.

"Timey, you're never gonna believe this—" Washington began to utter in sheer shock as his eyes widened through his protective goggles.

"Let me guess, you've got something?" He was smiling wildly, his hair billowing like some kind of wispy tree on top of his head, while the wind was practically burning the skin off of his face. He looked insane.

"It's something, alright."

A few hours later, Timey and his team hit into the said ' _something_.' They all stood there, looking down at the shimmering, miraculous sight in front of them. It was a plane. Or something that looked like a plane? It was huge, whatever it was, and Timey just couldn't believe he had _just_ picked up on the sheer 'largeness' of the object. Better yet, he couldn't believe something was _alive_ inside. All thoughts of his misery forgotten, his heartrate madly accelerating, and he could feel sweat beading along his back with nervous, excited energy. They had discovered something big. He could _feel_ it.

"That thing's gotta be _old_." Another engineer chimed in as they all peered down at the plane.

"I can't tell without closer inspection, but the oxidation looks surprisingly minimal. It might not be as old as we think." The team's head chemist noted.

"Well, let's get down there, then." Agent Andrews intervened, he was already strapping into some bungee cords to be lowered down into the crater. "Astron, you're in charge here, I think you should come with me."

* * *

It took an hour to get the two of them lowered onto the surface of the aircraft. It took them another hour just to get the hand-drill into the icy exterior. There was a gentle _zuh-zuh-zuh_ as the ice was cut, block-by-block, inch-by-inch. Andrews was getting exasperated, Timey could tell. But with these kinds of things, he knew you had to be patient. You didn't want to rush it, or you could risk crossing the line. The unknown was the unknown for a reason—you didn't run into the pitch black, you took baby steps, with your hands held out in front of you. So, he continued, inch-by-inch, zig-zagging the drill over the thick ice coating the aircraft, until finally, he could start to see cursive lettering bordering the outside— _The Valkyrie._

So, he had been right. It was a kind of bomber plane. He brushed off some ice off of the nose it. They just had to find the right place to enter it. To the one side, he could see the break of a colossal wing freeing itself from the hold of the glacial freeze. Timey was sure the other side mimicked the other, just the same. He blew air threw his teeth, into the protective layers that were swaddled around his face. _How do we get in there?_

He looked up and saw, to his surprise, the resurfacing of a turn-wheel, like those usually attached to watertight doors on ships. He smiled through his thick layers. He gestured to Andrews, who was sending some sort of message back to the SHIELD base back in mid-Greenland.

The two of tugged on their ropes hooked to their waits to be hoisted up onto the northern ledge of the plane. Timey pulled the hand-drill out once more and began to neatly cut the ice around the door, until the door could be open without assured hindrance from the deep freeze. He placed his thick mittens around the door's handle and gestured to Andrews. "On my count—

"One,

"Two,

"Three." And the two of them tugged with all their strength, grunting in laborious grunts as the door turning forward to open with screaming howl of protest. The light from the crew's work lights above showered in to show the dusty, dark-blue world below of the plane's interior.

And for the tenth time that day, Timey could only ask—how could anything have survived in here?

As the two of them lowered themselves into the plane, Timey felt a trill of crazy anxiety run through him. While he had been waiting for this moment for nearly a month, now, he still felt like there was some part of him that didn't deserve to be here. Not in the sense that he didn't feel 'skilled' enough, or that he felt inadequate, but that he felt, as he looked around at the empty, frozen misshapen lumps and molds of cargo and furniture, that this discovery wasn't something they were meant to 'discover.' It was quiet within the frozen walls of the plane. Sleepy, even. The wind was drowned out by the thick folds of snow and ice that had cradled the plane here for a long time. It felt wrong to be disturbing it. And in the same way, he supposed that's how he knew that there was something here. If it didn't want to be disturbed, then it was definitely with them.

And considering what would happen years following that fateful day of discovery and promise, Timey would look back and ask himself—if it would have been better if had he left that plane (and her inhabitants)—in the ice? He turned to the right, and there, nestled between the pilot's chair and a large box of ammunition, was the undeniable mold, shape, and gleam of shield. A shield with the undeniable star glimmering in the circular cords of blue and red.

"Sir, you're going to want to take a look at this." The engineer called over to Andrews.

Andrews walked over and Timey heard his breath hitch in his throat. He swallowed and blinked, Timey could see the tiny motion through his safety goggles. He pulled his com up from his thick, winter jacket and called to the other SHIELD agent stationed above with the team, "You're gonna wanna call this into the General, Castien," followed by, "No, I don't _care_ what time it is in Washington—this one's been waiting long enough."

Because beneath the shield, wrapped within the frozen arms of the legend, himself, was a young, curly-haired woman. And as Timey stepped closer, his transmitter, lit up like a brilliant, yet dangerously dry Christmas tree. A warning, right in front of him. All of it pointing to the fact that the both of them were unmistakably, irrefutably _alive_.


	2. wake up, cap

_Steven, are we going to die?_

 _Ice. Crashing. Crackling. Popping. Sparkling. Shimmering. Fermenting. Simmering. Sweltering. Swallowing. Ice—everywhere._ JUST HANG ON PEG, JUST HANG ON. PLEASE, JUST HANG ON.

 _I think so._

 _He reached out his arms, she mirrored him, he swallowed her up. His hands wrapped themselves behind her head, crushing her face into his neck, I love you, I love you, too as the plane_

If you asked him to explain it, he wouldn't be able to. Because when he woke—if he was actually awake, as part of him didn't really think he was ever awake during the 'waking periods'—he found himself miles and miles below the surface of the world. Submerged within a watery, half-frozen sea, where around him, in this infinite, timeless ocean where he found himself, the world moved around him in tragically slow circles of lifeless motion. He watched images appear, rising from the dunes of the bottom of the sea, sandy people, with grainy faces calling out to him, saying a name he couldn't remember… They were people from a life that had been lived. Perhaps full, in some instances, and perhaps shorter, in others. These images, they must have been from his life. He was certain at times, they were his, at least, but other times, he wasn't.

in one scene, a very recurring one, there was a boy, buck-teeth, thick-haired, _his ma didn't want him to tell people his name was Bucky but he did anyway._ muttering something about the 'end of the line' as he fell into a ravine

he couldn't remember what that was

another current whipped through the dark, endless sea of memories and a woman stood, cradling to her breast, a tiny child. she was crying. he could hear the soundless, numb cries resounding from this lovely woman, with the lovely face, pocked and pecked from hard, unkind labor and illness in her youth _darlin', you've got to live, now._ she begged not to god not to jesus not to anybody but the tiny child in her hands that struggled to even take a breath _you've got to win this war, you've got to_

a man, standing over the sickly child. sick and dying himself. coughing blood onto his cheeks. his eyes drain of all color as all the life leaves his facial features _YOU WANT TO GO TO WAR, DIS IS WHAT 'APPENS WHEN YOU GO TO WAR. EVERY GAHDDAMN DAY OF ME FUCKIN EXISTENCE IS A FUCKIN WAR Joseph, leave him alone. NO ME BOY WANTS TO BE A SOLDIER, 'E SHOULD SEE WHAT 'APPENS WHEN A SOLDIER FUCKIN GETS SICK JOSEPH LEAVE HIM—_ a hand powerfully came down onto the woman's face and she fell back onto the floor and the little sickly golden-haired kid screamed over the man and the woman and fell into a fit of wracking sobs that sounded more like death rattles than cries, tears sliding down his cheeks in thick and gooey masses like sticky maple syrup from the bleeding, cut-out-heart of a tree

but he couldn't remember who he was

he felt like he should know these people

The sea was vast, wide, and far above him was the surface. A sun, round and full of white, silvery light, hung from some distant sky that he wasn't sure he would ever see. It was a shimmering, protruding world, and he knew he couldn't reach it on his own. He looked around the scenes that danced around him slow-motion; a sick child crying over his beaten mother, the 9-year-old buck-toothed kid… These were things he had seen. Things he had already lived. They moved as he knew they would. He knew the precise moment that Joseph would lay his almighty hand into the soft flesh of Sarah, he knew when Bucky would introduce himself, or when he would, inevitably, fall from his hands and to his death.

He recognized the gentle-eyed teenager with the golden hair, with the near-perfect comb over, and the delicate, fragile frame. He knew this kid. It was like looking at an antique daguerreotype of your old man and recognizing the bits and pieces of his face on your own… Except, you know that he's not you. And just as he looked at this weak little man, he knew that that wasn't him. Something had happened to him.

He walked further down the tangled pathway, through the scenes of slow-moving people, until he reached what he had been looking for. A man with the kind eyes and the judgmental smile. He needed to know who you were. He needed to know if _he_ was worth it. Erskine. _I CAN DO IT. LET ME DO IT._ It was a test. Everything was a test. But he knew this place, this empty laboratory. He knew the dials and the controls and the engines and the whistles. He knew how it worked. He knew the large sealable, lead-based crate they had used. He knew this would make him into something else.

but where did he come from?

 _GRENADE. GET OUT OF THE WAY._ he's still skinny. he was a strip of wire wrapped around an MK II—a fragmentation-based hand grenade. it's force alone would have blown him to bits, but he didn't care. why should he? if he could save the world, wouldn't he? he saved them. he did save them right? he looked up to the empty barracks around him, searching for the countless people he had saved with such a grave sacrifice. is this how he died? no. this isn't how he died. he died after this. this is when he saw her.

Who did he see?

No, this is when he saw her.

WHO DID YOU SEE?

I saw…

WHO DID YOU SEE?

 _Steven, are we going to die? She was the most remarkable_

I saw her.

AND WHO IS SHE?

I… I don't know.

YES, YOU DO—WHO IS SHE?!

The sea was changing, churning, the memories and scenes picked up into dusty residue around him. They were forming into some kind of wildly-created tornado of rocks, sand, and ice. The world was altering. And something, amongst all the clouds of dust and formless, slushy ice, he could see it, then. In the distance, he could see it—a plane.

 _Steven, are we going to die?_ Her face was strikingly close, fervently real—bright eyes, _bright eyes that could melt hard, forge-worked steel and turn it into poetry worth crying over_ and a startling collage of features that while sharp and full _she had some kind of vitality that radiated off life like she was capable of creating herself like she had been divined, thought of, conceived, replicated, and begotten solely by herself_ were softer than anything any set of human eyes had ever laid upon. Her lips curved not in edgy lines, but in graceful swoops that meant to offer solace when you pressed your own against hers _her laugh created a cosmic event that shattered galaxies and celestial overlays, it rattled her lungs with fire and brassily knocked against Zeus' doorway_ she was more than anything he ever could have imagined

WHAT WAS HER NAME? YOU KNOW HER NAME.

And the dust settled onto that ancient plane. It wasn't ancient. He had been one with this plane since the very beginning. To know him, was to know this plane.

Why?

Because

she smiled at him from the front seat of a jeep, an exceptionally impressed grin that shined like all the rare jewels of the world

Because she was

he had never seen her cry before. he had never seen the terror in her eyes as he saw them now. flickering with an incessant, but neatly-composed panic. and those tears, those tiny and crystalline tears, interwoven with some kind of unique, vulnerable sadness. what she felt, she felt as no one had ever felt before. she didn't cry. she didn't cry, except when she knew that _Steven, are we going to die?_

Because she was _**Peggy**_.

And Peggy was on the plane.

And

so

was

he.

* * *

But then other times,

there was no sea,

no memories,

no distant sun,

nothing.

Just blackness.

Sheer and utter obscurity that coated everything he was and everything he ever would be.

He didn't even know his name.

* * *

Then one fine evening, in the afterglow of some fading twilight, he found himself standing in a kitchen. Pale, yellow walls surrounded him, a goldenrod island counter—attached to the wall, jutted out in the middle of the room. On top of it, there was a cutting board, which a paring knife lay across as well as some abandoned remains of vegetables. It was as if someone had started making something but stopped. And further in, making the corner of the kitchen, above the sink, were four Georgian windows, curtained with white sheets that were translucent enough to catch sight of the lovely sunset outside. There was a breeze flowing in from off of the currents of the summer night's air, breathing life into the room, billowing the curtains. And standing there, in the sun's soft, farewell flares, outlined by the pink and orange light, was a dark, curly-haired woman, wearing sandy-colored slacks and a dark blue blouse.

He felt some part of himself freeze at the sight of her, as if he had never anticipated her presence. This couldn't have been right. She didn't belong here. But yet, as he watched her, the way her shoulders moved as she inhaled, the way her hands fussed about in the soapy suds of the sink, the way she seemed to completely dwarf the dipping sun, he knew that she could have belonged anywhere and everywhere, all at once. She was a woman threaded and knitted with the knowledge of some fading civilization, or of some place that was her very own. Perhaps, that's what confused him, it wasn't that _she_ didn't belong, it was the idea that _this_ was her world, and he was simply a traveler she allowed to wander in.

"You have to wake up sometime, my darling." The woman said softly, her back still remained turned to him.

"I know." He admitted.

What did he know? Was he sleeping? He felt himself begin to slip, reeling from the revelation that there was some part of him that _knew_ , and another part that did not. How could she know, but he didn't?

Oh, he realized, staring at the set of her shoulders. So, that was it, then. She made the decisions. Because she knew him better than he knew himself.

"Will you be there?" He asked her, knowing her answer would be some impossible slip of information that he could never possibly hold onto. The vast grandiosity of the woman before him would eclipse all else, even her own words. She filled up every inch of this kitchen, every fiber of the world, as if the entire universe hummed from the very beat of her heart.

The woman turned, her face caught in the rays of the sun's last stretches of gentle light, tinging her curls and features with a golden illumination. Her eyes, lit with this strange, dusky sun, seemed to be filling with colors of violet, black opal, chocolate, hazelnut, and a fleshed-out gold that ringed around her pupils with an intensity that would have made God feel uncomfortable. She cast her gaze onto him, kneading him like he was dough through her weighted gaze, until she came to some kind of conclusion, some kind of judgment, a defiance that she, alone, made. Her lips parted and, with bated breath, muttered something to change everything: "I will."

* * *

Then, he was drowning.

The sea was forcing him downwards, pushing him beneath the comforting darkness of some distant past. The memories he had been seeing for centuries and eons and millenniums, flashed by in flashes and blurred arrays of people, smeared faces, names, and dates, all of it hitting him, at once.

A boy whose shirt didn't fit him because he was so scrawny. _Name's James Buchanan, but you can call me Bucky—_ everyone _does. And some day, I'm gonna be famous. I mean, I don't know what for, but somethin'._

A little, golden-haired child drawing Hercules fighting the Nemean Lion in his notebook in the dim light of an poorly-furnished dining room. His mother was reaching forward to peer over his shoulder. _Ah, so my boy wants to fight the lions?_

 _BUCKY—NO!_ His best friend, his brother, his fingers slipped through his, as he fell off the edge of a train into an icy river below.

A clash of her brown eyes against the baby blue of his. _I'm not leaving you. You're absolutely going to leave me. Excuse me, Captain, I don't believe you have the authority to tell me what to do._

It was then, that he realized, he wasn't sinking into the darkness below, but soaring upwards, towards the white sun above the surface. That was when he saw, standing on a tiny fishing boat, was _Peggy._ Her hands outstretched, reaching for his, and though her face was distorted in the murky waters, he could almost make out every feature.

 **Pearson winds up for a third pitch and—wait for it—it's good. A stark, cold breath of** _ **air**_ **blew across his face.**

She was nodding at him, in what seemed like encouragement, her hands dipping beneath the surface of the translucent water. He felt himself reaching for her, his hands lifting themselves upwards into the watery space above him. He was moving _too_ slow. He felt he would never reach her. But then he heard her voice, screaming at him from across the dimensional gap between them. " _JUST A LITTLE FURTHER, MY LOVE—COME, HOLD ONTO ME."_

 **There's gotta be at least ten thousand people here, Bob—it's like all of New York City came out to see the Dodgers.**

There were frightened tears in her eyes as she kept screaming to him, practically leaning over the boat, now, pushing most of her arms into the water. He could feel his breath beginning to shorten, burning in his lungs as he tried with everything to hold it in place—he was _actually_ drowning. _STEVE, PLEASE, DARLING, TAKE MY HANDS._

 **Folks, would you flip** _ **my**_ **wig—criminy! Look at the swing from Sanders, my God.**

And then, finally, _triumphant,_ as in one single leap, his fingers laced through hers and she tore him out of the water, pulling him out of the freezing ice water and into her arms. She encompassed him, breathed life back into his chapped, bruised lips, and pulled herself tighter against him. "Wake up, my darling, _wake_ -

His eyes fluttered open, and Steve Rogers, for the first time in 70 years, woke up.


	3. Slow Break

The first thing that Steve heard when he woke up was the radio.

"And would you look at Carson. He's windin' up for the pitch and—BAM!"

He pulled himself up from the fluffy mattress, fighting the wave of fatigue that washed over him. He curled his fingers around the edges of the box spring as he tried to focus his vision on the wall in front of him. It was paneled by a nicely-painted beadboard that surrounded the room in a soft, sleepy green and white pallet. The thing was, he could tell it was fresh paint. He had painted houses for a summer with Bucky, he _knew_ what fresh paint smelled like. And then there was the lamp on his bedside… It looked like any other lamp, lit from a standard electric-bulb with the standard shape and wattage of a fluorescent bulb… Except, as he peered closer, he noticed it _wasn't_ afluorescent bulb, but something stronger, something hard-wired and _brighter._ He swallowed uneasily, his blue eyes growing suspicious. What kind of hospital was this?

He looked down at his feet. He was wearing _boots?_ And the strange thing was, they weren't the ones he remembered being given from the standard U.S. boys' uniform… They were _like_ his old ones.

A car horn sounded outside his window from somewhere down the street. Without getting up from his position on the bed, he could see the familiar skyline of Manhattan. White, newly-built New Deal style buildings from the Depression cropped up in friendly, ambitious patterns and lines. In Europe, they didn't make the buildings like that. They were in plazas, squares, grids, and lines. In New York City, everything was chaotic. They had tried the grid thing in Brooklyn, you could see the prints from the beginning of the city, and notice those German architects try and compromise their sacred grids, but when the Irish came in, the buildings began to crop in wild and avant-garde streets. Blocks without borders, houses hooked and built into one another. Nothing was ever the same after the Irish moved in.

But what hospital was in Manhattan? He frowned at the discrepancy. There _was_ one near Battery Park, within Greenpoint, that looked out at Newton Creek… He would know, his ma used to work there… But that closed down right as the Depression began swingin' its way through New York. He tried to keep in check, but something was just _not_ right. It was givin' 'im the creeps.

Steve turned his head sharply when he heard the door open. Even the way the _hinges_ moved sounded off. Back then, hinges used a reverse-backwards-forwards standard of swinging so that the door, if it was properly oiled, made a _creack_ sound. But… This one didn't make a _sound_. _You're getting' yourself stuck up in a tree over nothin'._ He thought to himself— _calm down, Steve_ —as he watched a young, dark-haired woman come in. She was wearing a typical nurse's uniform, but not the one they wore in the War… No, this was the one the ladies who worked at the federal hospitals would wear. All fancy and nice-like.

But even then… Something about the way her tie hung against her shirt... It was too short. And then there was the matter of her undergarments— Steve stopped himself as his looked up into her eyes, it was better not to consider that one.

"Good morning," she smiled, her lips, coated with a fancy, glimmering mahogany shade, turned upwards into a teasing smirk, "or should I say afternoon?"

And that's when he heard the radio. No, _really_ heard the radio. And once he did, he realized he should have been listening all along.

"Man, wouldn't ya' love to have the youngsters pitchin' down there with the big dogs, Pete?"

 _Bucky had shoved a crackerjack so far down his shirt he had had to go to the john just to try and shake out his shirt and then he had gone to get ice cream with Bucky and his girl and his girl had asked Bucky who's your friend? Bucky had something like you mean my brother? And his girl had said somethin' like he's not your brother—is he really? C'mon, Buck, don't fool with me and Bucky had said Stevie is my brother, if you got somethin' to say bout' that little darlin' I can leave you here without a ride back to your daddy's house in Westchester and Bucky and Steve and BUCKY_

He sharply moved his eyes up to the woman, standing in the doorway, looking at him with that stupid, stinking, fake offsetting grin. "Where am I?" His brow furrowed sharply. The sun, which had been peeking through the windows, shadowed across his back, causing his face to grow dark in the shadows. It caused all his angular, chiseled features to create silhouettes of themselves across his cheeks, making him appear to be even more serious.

"You're in a recovery room in New York City."

"Oh-ho! OH-HO, PETE—THE DODGERS TAKE THE LEAD 8-4 OH, BOY, WHAT A GAME WE GOT TODAY."

 _Bucky thought it was funny he thought it was funny Bucky taught him how to laugh because he never laughed because he never thought anything was funny but Bucky always thought it was funny but Bucky but Bucky but Bucky I'm invisible_

 _I'm invisible_

 _She was wearing_ that _dress. Red. She could have worn all the colors and looked like a damn beacon with all that_ light… But she chose _red._ Because red made a declaration of war, red signaled hope, it signaled rebellion, it signaled all the things she was… And she wore it across her chest, slinked right over her bosom, hugging her supple, lovely curves like she was molded within the sands of time and tucked within the folds of that gown. _I'm invisible Bucky had said I'm turning into you. It's, it's like a horrible dream…_

 _And I might, when this is all over, go dancing._ But what happened? Why hadn't they gone dancing?

"The entire stadium is on their feet, Pete, LOOK AT EM'."

 _Bucky had said that, said that about Steven, are we going to die?_

And that was when it really came back to him. That's when the entire world, the entire room grew darker, and that's when he stopped looking at the floor, and got up from the bed. He came to his full height and towered over the young woman, realizing some integral fact: The world felt wrong because it _was_ wrong. She was _not here_ , and she _needed_ to be.

That's when he remembered Peggy.

"Where am I, really?"

The young woman, unsure and a bit nervous, frowned for a split second, before her face recalibrated and fixed into the easy, offsetting smile once more. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

"The game." He said fiercely, his eyes murderously boring into hers. "It's from May, 1941. I know 'cause I was there."

The woman's façade dropped. Her smile loosened on her face and slipped off, dropping somewhere onto the floor as Steve saw the panic begin to set into her features.

He took a dangerous step towards her, his face growing thunderously uneven with each second that passed. "Now, I'm gonna ask you again: Where am I? And secondly, _where's my girl?"_ His fingers found her throat and shoved her into the wall, causing the woman's head to slam against the paneling behind her. And unfortunately, whoever installed it, must have done a lousy job, because the moment her skull made contact, the entire panel fell down to expose a wide, dark hangar outside of his room.

Steve frowned sharply and dropped the woman where he had been standing a moment ago, leaping over the paneled wall and began running out into the hangar. He had to find _her_. He took a sharp turn, passing through the cavern and into a large, open-glassed room where dozens of people were wearing strange clothes and carrying strange technological devices in their hands. He didn't have time to look.

"Captain Rogers— _wait!_ " The woman screamed behind him, but he didn't care. He was just running. Running to get out of there, running to find Peggy.

"All agents, code thirteen!"

He didn't know what 'code thirteen' was, but he was pretty sure it wasn't good. Because as soon as the woman made the announcement, the people—the 'agents,' as she had called them—turned sharply on him, advancing in all directions. He shoved them into walls, throwing a man out of the window he ran past, and leaped over some blur of a human form advancing towards him. He knew he couldn't fight them all—there were too many, but all he had to do was find Peggy and then they could escape. Then, they could _leave, escape…_ Together, they could figure this out.

He came to the doors of the building, shoving them open so hard that the glass busted outwards, shattering in a shower around him as he ran out into the street. He kept racing, the world, noisy and loud and angry, blurred past him in a wave of motion and madness. Until he realized, as he came to stand in a dizzyingly circle, full of giant screens, lights, cameras, cars—were they _cars_?!—and people…so many damn people…that he had no idea where he was.

Steve was breathing hard, sweat beading his brow as he looked back the way he came, and that's when the scariest revelation as of yet, dawned on him—he had no idea where he had come from. Nothing was familiar. Nothing looked the same. There was nothing to hold onto. There were crowds of people, all wearing strange and inappropriate things, gawking at him from the sidewalks as the strange, wild-looking cars honked at him from all directions. He found it hard to look upwards, as the towering buildings, so tall they looked as if, in another few feet they could top-size, threatened to crush him. He looked back down at his feet, feeling his breath hitch in his throat. He couldn't breathe.

 _He couldn't_ breathe _._

 _Where the hell am I?_

Sirens screeched behind him as six, serious-looking Acura SUVs pulled around him in a circle. He was surrounded, he looked in all directions and realized there was no way out of this one, even he could see that. He looked back behind him to see a tall man in a black trench coat with an eye-patch approaching him. He looked mean. He looked menacing. He looked like a guy who didn't take blue-nosin' bullshit.

"I'm sorry about the little show back there… We thought it best to break it to you slowly."

Steve, still breathing heavily, partially from the exertion of sprinting faster than _literally_ a moving car on the highway, and from the _shock_ of so much _life…_ all shoved in this tiny, square-like place… Where was the hell was he, anyway?

"Break what?" He asked, his voice on the verge of cracking. Although, no one could have known. No one but Peggy.

"You been asleep, Cap. For almost 70 years."

Steve snapped his eyes to Trench Coat, his eyes wide, his breath breaking from his chest in a panic. "70 years…" He whispered beneath his breath, looking desperately around the city. If it was New York, like the woman back at the 'recovery room' had said… Then, this place, this was where he had grown up. He should know it, he should _recognize_ it… He had lived here his whole life. If he could do that, if he could find the proof to point to some evidence that this was his home, he could grasp onto something… He could _come_ to reality.

And that's when he saw the street sign, hanging over all of them, a white-and-green sign, bearing on the name of the well-known Broadway Ave. He knew it was true, then. He turned sharply back to Trench Coat. "I wasn't alone. I came here _with… With her."_ He said softly.

The man with the eyepatch cocked his head and swallowed, watching Cap with an almost sympathetic gaze. Something told Steve, Trench Coat didn't find much to be sympathetic towards. "Like I said, we wanted to break it to you slowly."

* * *

" _Access granted, Fury, Nicholas J."_ Trench Coat pulled his hand away from the "biometric scanner," as they were called, as they continued down the next flight of stairs. They must had been walking down steps for at least twenty minutes, now. Steve felt the fluctuations of the Earth begin to bend and shift as they went _deep_ into the basements of SHIELD's New York Headquarters. And just as soon as Cap thought they were done encountering stairs, there was another _…_ and _another_ …

The deeper they went, the more concerned he became. Why did they have to go so deep into the Earth? Peggy should have been closer to the sun, in the light of day—the place she _belonged._ And the fact that they had done all of this, moved them— _separated_ them, without him knowing… Well, even if he had been awake for less than a few hours, even if he had just met Trench Coat and this brand-new world, he didn't trust it. He didn't trust anything.

At that point, he wasn't sure if he ever would.

Even so, he was a bit relieved to be out of the flashing lights and discombobulated nature of the outside world. Being down here in the darkness, he could pretend that what he had seen above had been out of dream, a figment of his 'overly-active' imagination. He could pretend that it meant nothing. He could pretend that it wasn't the reality he suddenly, forcibly had to accept.

" _Access granted, Fury, Nicholas J."_ The automated voice spoke out as Trench Coat, or Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD—whatever the hell that meant, as that's as far as he had gotten to telling Steve as to who he was—opened yet another door to yet another long, indistinguishable corridor. This place was strange; cold and directionless, but everyone they had encountered seemed to have a direction, a purpose. People didn't meander here. They didn't speak, either. To say in the least, Steve wasn't exactly excited to make new friends.

"Why is she down here?" Steve asked sharply, as the two walked further into the dim shadows of the corridor.

"I'm not the person you should be askin'." Fury tersely replied, leaving absolutely no room for Steve to make another comment. It was pretty obvious the guy was like that all the time.

But he didn't have to wait long, because as soon as Steve had given up all hope on stopping soon, they came to a door. A big, glass sliding door that opened on both sides, not simply the air-sealed, sliding open-to-one-side doors they had been passing through all along. As Fury opened the door, Steve could make out a long, glass tunnel like the ones that go through aquarium tanks. They began to walk through it, crossing over a long, depthless channel that seemed to stretch down into the core of the earth. Steve wasn't one to fear heights, but even so, he couldn't help but feel a sense of vertigo. He quickly looked back up to the approaching glass structure before them.

To describe it simply, it was like looking at a giant, frosted-framed glass box. A glass box hanging over an abysmal hole in the ground. So, this is where they were keeping Peggy. He liked these guys a little less every minute. The closer they got, Steve could see it was a layered box, as an airtight wall seemed to be pressed against the actual room inside, while all sorts of vents and ventilators were hooked up to it, pushing specialized oxygen and nitrogen inside.

Fury pressed his hand up to scanner, but this time, it required an eye-scan as well. Steve had never seen anything like it. A pale blue light shifted over Fury's 'good' eye and suddenly, the door opened with a friendly chirp and a _puschhhh_ as the airlock slid open. Boy, was the future fancy.

When they came into the next room, there was a young woman standing within. She was wearing a long, white coat with a surgeon's mask covering her lips. She was staring at a tablet intently, (Steve thought it was a folder of some kind), but instantly looked up when she heard the door hiss open. Though it was pulled back in a carefully-done ponytail, Steve could see the woman had ice-white hair, and _not_ the popular, frosted blonde, but actually _white_ hair. There was not a single strand of color anywhere. It was a bit shocking to see, considering the ladies back home were religious about keeping their hair in stiff, meticulous styles. And if that wasn't enough, the young woman's face—a collection of mix-matched features that ranged from a soft nose, to a rattled, strong chin, to a strangely-wrinkled forehead with bright, intensive Windex-blue eyes—looked intensely back at Cap, as if she was insulted that he had tried to look at her.

"Captain Rogers, Agent Octavia Frost—she's the head doc on Agent Carter's situation." Fury motioned to the young woman, as if he had dubbed her with that name, himself.

Steve frowned at Fury's movement towards the doctor, it was obvious they trusted one another. There was a relationship here, not a romantic one, but an exclusive, confidential affiliation that even he could _feel._ Calling it friendship would have been generalizing something inconclusive, but yet, very _definitive._ As far as he could tell, it was something deeper than mere companionship. Besides, it wasn't a relationship that Steve necessarily wanted to define… And he was smart enough to know that to define it would be fruitless, and only waste time. Besides, he wasn't here for them.

He was here for Peggy.

"Captain Rogers." Agent Frost held out her hand to the Captain with a cautious smile tinging her lips. With her surgeon mask pulled down, she seemed a bit more standoffish. It was as if the mask covered the shyness of her lips—the part of her face that truly told people how she felt. A smile that lied to the face of the world, a smile that pretended normalcy, a smile that wasn't even aware of its own deceitful nature.

Steve shook her hand. "Agent Frost." He was brief. He knew that wasn't appropriate, but then again, he didn't care. He didn't care about any of these people, he didn't care about this century—he cared about _one_ woman _,_ and he wanted to know where she was.

"He wants to see her." Fury spoke from behind Steve, just as Frost pulled her hand away from Steve's.

Frost gave a nod to show she had heard but didn't make a move to open the door. Instead, she gestured for Steve to come stand near her before a frosted pane of glass. "Captain, it's important you understand what's going on with Agent Carter, before I show you anything, okay?" She frowned slightly, but a practical look remained on her face, as if this was a matter-of-fact that she told everyone. Right, because this kind of thing happened every day. Right.

Steve's face, as it rightfully should have, compressed together in disconcertment. His brow squelched, his lips tightened, and his teeth clenched with obvious discontent. "I don't care." He said softly, as if he was trying to speak in the presence of a sleeping child. Except, he wasn't, and he _knew_ he wasn't. So, it wasn't a matter of being silent… It was a matter of laying down a land-mine, without raising suspicion. And luckily for her, Steve was a gentleman, and he had chosen to warn her with a dangerously soft tone. "I need to see _her_."

Frost noticed his expression, as her eyes rolled over him with an analytical glance, but where most would fear the heavy gaze of Captain America, the young doctor only seemed more at _ease_. She met his eyes for a moment, held them there as if to say: 'this was your choice,' before she turned and pressed a button on the panel in front of her. The frosted screen slid up and revealed a dimly-lit room.

At first, Steve couldn't see much as it was so poorly-illuminated, but then he began to make out shapes; machines with tubes and hooks and liquids and sucking-mechanisms, trays and carts chalked-full of medical equipment, and in the middle of it all, like a bright, glorious, radiant planet, trapped in this twisted universe, hooked up to monstrous cords and IVs and cables and translucent threads and plastic nooses, was _Peggy_. Steve took a step closer to the glass, his fingers unconsciously curling into fists as his nails cut deep into the soft flesh of his palm. He didn't even feel the blood as it seeped through his fingers. And perhaps he should have noticed, Agent Frost certainly did, but he couldn't believe what he was seeing… There was barely a spot on her that wasn't _consumed_ by cords, by tubes, by _shackles…_

She looked like she was sleeping. Her long, curled eyelashes gently rested on the top of her cheeks like exotically-beautiful petals from some rare flower. And she seemed to be breathing in slow-syncopated rhythms, but then again, the machines seemed to be pumping at the same rate as her lungs, mechanically lifting them out of her chest cavity… And then the way that her chest seemed to fill too wide with oxygen… He would have let it go, he would have listened… But there was something so wrong about it. The blankets were too tight around her chest, her fingers looked clammy and cold, her skin was pale… _so pale…_ There were cables slinking into her mouth, into her nostrils, her ears—everything, every opening, it was as if they were trying to take her life away. He could see the very light _drain_ from her.

That's when he knew what was wrong. She was sick, his girl. She needed rest. She needed sleep. _But how could she sleep, when all those things were drilling_ _into her?_ That thought made Steve stiffen with a rage so blatant, so pure, he didn't think he had ever been that angry in his life.

"What did you do to _her_?" He asked softly, as if everything hinged upon that question, as if everything could be solved with the _answer_.

Frost cleared her throat. "Captain, listen to me—"

"No, I want to know _what you did to her?!_ " He turned sharply, finally, with an agonizing clench of his teeth, to face the doctor. "What are those things? What—What is she—"

"Those machines are keeping her alive, Captain. Now, if you calm down, and _listen_ to me, I will explain everything, _okay_?" It was the high-pitched idiosyncratic 'a' in her speaking that made something in his chest freeze. He remembered the dialect. God, it had been so long since he had heard anyone talk like that. Even before this century, it had been _so long…_ But he'd never forget it.

Agent Frost was from Brooklyn.

* * *

"Another six months and she would have died. Literally. Frozen solid." Agent Frost said from behind her desk, throwing a pen back into place beside a large stack of medical books. She cleared her throat and cocked her head at Cap with an odd, pointed gaze, as if she expected something of him.

But when Steve didn't answer, as he was too busy staring at the floor with a mixture of rage, confusion, and disbelief, which all contributed to a particularly anguished look, Frost took it as a sign to go on. He hadn't said anything for the past 30 minutes, not when they were climbing up all the stairs, not when they walked through the mainframe of SHIELD (where the place was jampacked with computers, televisions, holographic projections, and other highly-advanced technological machines), not even when they entered Frost's office (a cozy, subtle space away from Fury and the other agents). Frost has figured, at that point, she was expected to just keep talking until he decided he was good and ready to talk.

"We're keeping her submerged in the low-altitude, sub-freezing temperatures because her body would, in a matter of speaking, go into anaphylactic shock and pretty much _melt_. I mean, the woman has basically survived an entire crusade of a singularly-autonomic human evolution, on a cellular level." Frost explained as she watched the Captain. He was sitting, turned on a three-quarter axis, so he wasn't facing her, nor was he facing the other side of the room, staring out the window, at the busy city below her office (Frost was on the 'penthouse' level of the SHIELD's NYC HQ, the view _was_ pretty stunning. To Steve, it was probably pretty alarming).

She continued to watch him for another moment or two, trying to gauge if he was getting any of this or not, before she bit her lip and nodded to herself. "You probably want to go to her, don't you?"

At this, something in Steve's shoulders froze. It wasn't as if they were moving before, or if they were, she didn't notice, but there was a muscle, a bone—maybe even a _ligament—_ that found contention with the words that came out of her mouth. So much so, that the very fragments of flesh on the super solider, were frozen. His eyes slowly shifted to Frost's, meeting hers with a heightened, yet unshaken gaze. But despite his resolve to not reveal his terror of this new world, she saw all kinds of emotions swimming there, within his gaze. All the ones to be expected, of course; fear, anger, anguish, disbelief, etc, etc… But then, something so convoluted, shuttered in plain sight, as it was a carnal terror, an instinctual premonition of something lurking… No, the world outside _didn't_ scare him, or maybe it did, but he didn't care that it did. He had seen bodies blown up before him, he had watched his friends die before his eyes. Yeah, Frost had read the report. She knew who James Barnes was.

He wasn't scared, he was scientifically, quite literally, academically, terrified to his natural cortisone-powered, super-serumed _core_ , of losing _her_.

And once he realized, she knew, he instantly looked away.

Frost figured that was the best response she would get out of him, so she swallowed and cleared her throat once more. "You're different than her, you get that, right? Your metabolism is faster than an _actual_ cheetah, Rogers. You got lucky with the serum because it put your body into 'emergency lockdown,' meaning, it froze every bodily process you didn't need, except your cardiovascular system.

"Peggy, on the other hand, she's human, Captain Rogers. She's a human woman, _frozen_ from 1945. You know what existed in 1945 that doesn't exist anymore? Now, in 2012? Smallpox, polio, measles—you name it. Just because your girl didn't have it, then, doesn't mean the bacteria wasn't on her. We can't risk an epidemic just because you wanna hold her hand." Frost paused, watching Steve's face go from murderous, to deeply saddened, to enraged, again, all in a mere 45 seconds.

"Why does that—"

"She hasn't taken a shit in 70 years, Steve." Frost dropped, quite literally, onto the soldier in front of her. Steve's face went abruptly white with embarrassment, she could even see his ears turning _pink._ She didn't feel bad, though. No, this was something Steve needed to hear. "And maybe that's not somethin' you wanna hear, because who cares about 70 year-old shit? Me. That's who. Because you know how much bacteria, how many harmful microscopic organisms _crawl_ in human shit? A lot. And we're talkin' about shit that's 70 years old. All that bacteria, all those germs, they're preserved, safe; in fact, they've _thrived._

She _needs_ to be quarantined, not just for the sake of me and other humans, but for herself… The world is a dangerous place for her, Steve. She doesn't have an immune system, at least not one that's ready for the evolved, titanium-lined germ cells that we have in the 21st Century."

"Don't you have medicine? Something to give her—" He tried to reason once more, only to be cut off by Frost, again.

"The common cold would kill her, Captain. A case of the sniffles, she dies." Frost fixed him with a heavy, expectant, and pragmatic look. She wasn't joking, her lips a thin, tense line of seriousness.

Steve looked back down at his hands, angry at himself for something, angry at himself for everything. She could see him looking at something between his fingers, she could see him cradling something there, in his grasp. She tried not to feel bad for watching him struggle as he took the metaphorical, but oh-so _real,_ weight of the world—Peggy's world—in his hands and adjusted it onto his shoulders. She had read Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged,_ she knew what happened when you tried to hold everything upon yourself. She could see the broken pieces now, scattered around her own feet from years ago…

But even so, Steve Rogers wasn't her, he wasn't even human, by 'human standards.' Maybe he was different, maybe he could hold Peggy Carter's world and his… She doubted it, but still—her therapist thought it was better if she at least pretended to be hopeful. "Look," she folded her hands and placed them on her desk, leaning into the movement as she looked down at her folded fingers, "everything about all of this—you wakin' up in the quote-on-quote 'recovery room,' Fury basically ambushin' you in Times Square, even _me_ —it's all been real thought-out, Steve.

"I mean, you gotta have picked-up on the accent." She said with a sideways smile. Eh, it wasn't really a smile, but more or less, a cheeky half-lift of her lips. But when Steve didn't reply, he was back to staring out her office window yet again, she nodded to herself once more, and continued: "Everything SHIELD has done has been about trying to rehabilitate you in some way, and _I know_ it hasn't worked. But it probably won't. You woke up, the world's changed, and there's nothin' you can do. Just try and _live_ in it, for a minute, though, okay? Because I know you wanna do somethin' for her, you think there's a button you can press, a dial you can adjust—but there's _not._ The fact of the matter is, Steve, she's alive _because_ of you. You hear me? You kept her alive, Cap, now let me do my job, and make her better."

Steve turned his head, his eyes meeting Frost's, and for the first time, since they began this conversation, he nodded. It was an agreement, a contract of sorts. He would give her a chance: one, chance, to, save, the, one, person, he, couldn't, lose.

* * *

 **A/N: HELLO MY DEAR LOVELIES,**

 **THANKS SO MUCH FOR THE SUPPORT IN REVIEWS, FAVORITES, FOLLOWS-ALL THAT FUN STUFF, IT MEANS SO MUCH TO ME. :) Anyway, this is going to be one of the last chapters for a LONG while. I'm going to try and write during the school year (I started on Tuesday :/), but I doubt I'll be able to because I absolutely suck at trying to write and focus, at the same time.**

 **However, I recommend two things while you wait:**

 **1\. Go read my best friend, Ode to Ivy's fics, she has a brand spankin' new one,** _Fresh Metal, Flesh Metal_ **about Bucky Barnes/Darcy Lewis that is absolutely adorable, and I assure you, it's going to be worth the trip over the internet lines. Although, my personal favorite is her masterpiece,** _Ode to the End,_ **it's a fic about Avenger babies crossing dimensional divides and meeting their siblings of THE SAME AVENGERS. It's trippy as fuck, it's heartbreaking, it makes you cry tears of joy and laughter. It really is such AN AMAZING read. Seriously.**

 **2\. And once you do that (AND ONLY IF YOU DO THAT), check out my other Steggy fic, _Go Ask Him About Peggy,_ Peggy's running around, working for HYDRA, murdering innocent people, it's great. LOL. NOT. But seriously, give it a try if you're in the mood for more. :)**

 **And with that rambling over and done with, THANKS SO MUCH FOR READING AND ALL OF YOUR LOVE AND I WISH YOU ALL THE LUCK IN THE WORLD WITH YOUR ENDEAVORS.**

 **-Fel**


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